I think you Tae Kwon Do people don't appreciate how much I do actually know what I'm talking about with TKD. I'm from Kitsap County, and I studied at Lancaster's Korean Karate, which arguably was not the best dojang around, since Victor Solier also had a TKD school in that area. If you are a TKD fan and you don't know who Victor Solier is, you should find out, since he is the only justification for your martial art's existence.

Victor would sometimes have to take long breaks from his kickboxing career because of permanent injuries. He got most of these injuries NOT by spinning-back-kicking people out of the ring in kickboxing matches, BUT FROM TEACHING TAE KWON DO. Specifically, he has broken both knees teaching TKD classes, if I understand correctly.

Were his TKD students more competent fighters than other TKD students? The ones who cross trained in Kickboxing, yes. But from what I saw, his students that did only TKD would totally freak out and NOT spar you if they found out you had a kickboxing (or knock-down Karate) background.

I am sure that Victor and many of his kickboxing students would not agree with my position on TKD, and they can probably kick my ass. I don't know how many TKD people I have ran into that cross trained in Muay Thai and then went around saying "NOW lets see how much you say my TKD sucks," and then proceeded to use 99% Muay Thai moves whenever they sparred, claiming it was TKD since some of it was kicks.

As far as TKD sucking for pre-kickboxing training goes, I have seen this many times where TKDers had a hard time picking up the round kick specifically than people with no martial arts experience at all, and in general just sucked extra bad in the ring far beyond most beginners. So then I suppose someone is going to have to do a field study of some kind to find out for sure one way or the other, but until then, TKD people understand that not everyone agrees with you that TKD is some kind of great prep class for kickboxing (and that some of us HAVE also done TKD before.)

I wouldn't show him as a good example, since he did TKD - and that's just too horrible of a habit to be able to hold him up as some kind of role-model. I'm just saying that a multiple-time world-kickboxing champ is the best fighter the TKD community has produced, so that his TKD is probably the best-case scenario.

How do you break both knees? One at a time. Doing crazy spinning kicks and getting your toe caught on the carpet - using rigid TKD with kickboxing intensity.